


Forecasts

by VivWiley



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Post-The Truth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-13
Updated: 2013-05-13
Packaged: 2017-12-11 17:21:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/801208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VivWiley/pseuds/VivWiley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Scully writes to Mulder as they search for the next round of answers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forecasts

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: The X-Files and its characters are the property of Fox Broadcasting and 1013 Productions. No infringement is intended and no profit will be made.

Dear Mulder:

Twilight has finally brought some relief from a long day of heat and humidity. I am sitting on the porch, gratefully relaxing in a breeze coming in from the East, and trying to find the words to start this journal.

Once before I kept a journal, trying to explain my thoughts and decisions to you during a dark and difficult time. It was a time when I thought our journey together would reach too abrupt an end. I tried to use those pages to help myself understand the byways of what I thought to be my final days and to help you understand how important our journey had been. I needed you to know that I wanted to travel with you as far as I could, but thought I would not make the final distance. As with so much in our lives, those circumstances changed, and I found myself leaving that journal unfinished.

Now I find myself taking pen to paper again. Beginning a record of another difficult time. We are apart once more. For how long we do not know. And I cannot see clearly to the end of the road when I hope our paths will converge again. We are out traveling in an uncertain world and there are arduous journeys ahead of each of us. That this parting is voluntary does not, I find, make it any easier. That we agreed to this new separation brings little comfort in the small dark hours of the morning.

I miss your voice, Mulder. I sense that you miss mine as well. So I write to you here, in the hope that my words or at least the thoughts behind them will somehow reach you wherever you are traveling. In the hope that our journeys will not be as long as I fear. In the hope that you will be home to me soon.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

 

_August 23_

It rained again today.

Since we decided to part, to take up our separate missions, I have concentrated on gathering the data from the older experiments that we suspect were scattered throughout the country. My work is proceeding. I have gathered about half the research material I need and am close to tracking down that documentation on the labs that we believe were involved. It is exacting and tedious analysis, but I believe I'm making progress of sorts. It would be easier with some of my old resources, but we make do with what we have.

I have had to make extensive use of the university library here. Some of the older data are so "out of date" (little do they know) that they have never been archived on the Bio Lab's research website, so I have to delve into musty stacks to find what I'm looking for. It's strange to be back in the mode of full-time student/researcher. After med school was over, I didn't expect to find myself ever living this kind of life again. But my life has been full of the unexplained and unexpected since I met you. So, I continue to hunt for obscure texts and pose riddles to research librarians.

There is a worry, of course. Will my work attract the wrong kind of attention? Will my requests for manuscripts long since sent to off-site storage send up alarms? I'm careful, of course, to disguise my research - to check out masses of stuff that has nothing to do with what we're after, but I worry.

We had so many discussions about security. About how to cover our tracks, and why we couldn't contact each other during these long days. It is why I make no attempt to contact you directly, even though I suspect I know where you are. It is why I am so cautious in this town - never engaging in long conversations, never drawing attention to myself. I take seriously all those things we talked about.

On some other level, though, I think maybe it doesn't matter. The ubiquitous watching eyes we lived with for so long are still out there or they aren't. It's why I allow myself to keep this journal - this extended letter to you, which could be its own form of betrayal if it fell into the wrong hands.

I need this journal even more than a false sense of security. I need to keep talking to you in these pages - if only to keep from talking to myself too much. If only to keep from wanting to scream.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_September 4_

It's sunny today. The sunlight makes me feel lost and small. It is too bright and I want to hide. It's a silly reaction, to feel so exposed.

Ridiculous, I know. I used to love the sun. It was something I learned when we lived in San Diego. Despite all the years I lived in the DC-Maryland area, I never quite forgot what it was like to live in the sunshine.

Now, though, it seems too much. How can anything be that bright and cheerful in the midst of all that is going on? Again, I know I'm being ridiculous. There is sun  
regardless of the state of the world.

I'm just tired and frustrated. The research didn't go well today. The data I was hoping to find turned out to be a mere chimera. The abstract of the manuscript had led me to hope that one of the missing peptide sequences had been found back in 1965 in an experiment that was supposed to be doing something else entirely. I'd forgotten how badly written some of these abstracts could be. It was a dead end. Something you'd think I'd be used to by now, but today's disappointment seems more bitter than I'd expected.

Maybe I imagined that if I'd found this one thing that I would be within some tangible reach of our being back together. Of getting back to...if not normal life, at least something more normal.

It's the small things I miss. Not looking over my shoulder all the time. My real hair color. The ability to call my mom to just chat. Knowing that I am an FBI Agent. It is strange to no longer have a professional identity. To no longer know quite how to describe myself to others.

In a university town, there are always itinerant scholars of somewhat dubious professional credentials, so I can blend into yhe quiet denizens of the libraries and lecture halls here,  
but I know that I am not an academic. I don't know yet what I am now. Who and what have I become in this new life of ours? I am your partner. I hold on to that thought.

Someone asked me how old I was the other day and I had to stop and try to remember whether my birthday had passed without my noticing. When did that happen to me? When did I forget to keep track of the small but vital details of my life?

When did my horizons narrow to encompass nothing but this work I'm desperately trying to complete?

We put so much of ourselves into this work. It is sometimes difficult to remember that we had lives before this. It is difficult to remember what those lives were like. But as consumed as I am by this, and as tired as I am tonight, I think I am more alive now than I was before the X-Files. Before you.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_September 15_

Rain again. There are puddles everywhere, tiny oceans washing up against the shores of curbs, trees, edges of the grass.

I realize I don't know why I begin every letter to you with a weather report. It's so mundane, but maybe that has become the point. The weather is one of the few things that remains just as it was for me. Rain is still rain. And so I tell you what it is like where I am. Or at least I tell you what the weather here is.

What it is like here, without you, is something else entirely.

Maybe I tell you about the rain, or the sun or the wind because they are simple phenomena in a life that has lost so much of its simplicity.

Maybe I tell you about the weather because it is the one thing I can think about and not want to weep. But that's overly dramatic, and we have no time for drama, do we?

I never expected to grow up and be a Navy wife - my husband gone for months at a time to sea. You are not my husband, and yet...I finally appreciate some of both my mother's anxiety and her strength. Ahab's deployments lasted a minimum of six months at a time. There were so many years when my mother had to give up 50% of her life to a partnerless state. She was resilient, she managed our household, got us to school on time, cooked our dinners, handled the small everyday crises and still managed to attend the Officers' Wives Club lunches. For the first time, though, I understand the look I would sometimes see in her eyes late in the evening when she thought none of us was really seeing her.

It is so strange to be without you. I miss talking to you, our familiar arguments, the give and take over theories, ideas, beliefs. Without you here, I know that my analyses may not be as complete, or at least not as stringently tested and questioned.

You know me. I worry my theories, prod them, test them, hold them up to the light. Sometimes, to amuse myself, I play Devil's Advocate, trying to imagine what you would say about my approach. Trying to see the world through your eyes.

I am rarely successful. You always surprise me, Mulder. It's just one of many things I miss about you. I miss being surprised by your unexpected analyses and arcane knowledge. I  
miss the passion of your convictions and the way you would hold to your beliefs and theories sometimes out a sheer stubbornness simply because you knew you were right beyond any sort of conventional logic or wisdom.

I miss your passion and focus. But sometimes, in the dead of night, when I can't sleep and all my logic has deserted me, I worry about your passion for the quest. I worry that it will consume you again and you'll forget to come home to me. And you owe me that homecoming, Mulder. Don't forget the promise you made. You promised you'd be back. I'm going to hold you to that.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_September 25_

It's overcast today, neither warm nor cold, just a strange in between. The air seems very still.

What are you doing this Saturday? Do you even remember what a weekend is? I'm not sure I do anymore.

The library is closed today and the town nearly shut down for some kind of Fall Festival. I seem to recall seeing flyers about pumpkins or scarecrows or something. So I am at loose ends for the first time in a long time. When did I lose track of the seasons? How did it get to be fall?

Have we really been gone for so long? I find I cannot write entries in this journal every day. To do so would be too visible a reminder of the passing of time, and how long we've been apart. I only write to you when I can no longer stand not to be talking to you. When I am missing you too fiercely.

Have you found what we are seeking? I don't think you have yet, or else you would have found me by now. I somehow don't fear that you are dead - I think I would know, somewhere in the center of my being if you were no longer. I do worry that you are hurt or lost, but through everything else, I believe you will return to me. It's odd what beliefs we finally cling to. Belief is, itself, an inherently irrational act, a reaching out into a vast and unblinking unknown, but somehow comforting. I believe you will return. I believe in you. I believe in us.

I know we agreed that this was what we needed to do. Our paths had to separate for a while. The work we needed to do required our different skills, in different parts of the world. This was the logical thing to do. We made a decision like this once before; our reasons at the time also grounded in logic and reason.

I am suddenly sick of logic.

It seems like we spent so many years dancing around each other, an intricate pattern of advance and retreat interrupted by abductions, conspiracies and stupidity. God, it all sounds so melodramatic, doesn't it? But our lives are the stuff of melodrama. How else can you describe them?

But then, after all that, we were miraculously together, in the same time and space. I can still feel that peace and fragile happiness - that moment of "yes" as we lay together on that cramped motel bed. I can smell you. There are moments when I believe you smell like secrets. It is more erotic than you know.

I can feel your arms encircling me, the heat of your body a darker, softer heat against the backdrop of the desert that surrounded us. I want to be back there so much I ache. I can only live in the hope that we will be together again soon. That we will have another moment of peace before it is all far too late.

You were such an unexpected thing in my life. I still don't know quite how it happened, when it happened, why it happened. I only know that somewhere very early on in our partnership I realized I never wanted to work with anyone else. And then, a little later, I realized you were a permanent part of my life. I didn't put labels on it, I simply knew that you were meant to be there. Always. That you were the solution to the equation of my heart.

It's getting late. The candle whose light I am borrowing to write this letter is burning down. I think I will go to bed now. If the fates are kind, I will dream of you. Good night, Mulder. I hope wherever you are your sleep is peaceful.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_November 2_

Cloudy, windy, grey.

Where are you today? What is the weather like where you are? Why do I write you questions I know will never be answered, or at least not answered in anything resembling real time?

It's been several weeks since I wrote the last entry. I'd gotten word through some of our old friends that there was some lab activity in Iowa that I needed to check out. It was a long way out there and back. I know you aren't really aware of the passage of time between one entry and the next - I have nowhere to mail these letters I am writing to you - but I still feel as though I should be apologizing to you for the long silence during my trip.

I'm weary and there is little of interest to report. It was a long journey for nothing. The site I was directed to had long since been abandoned. It's possible that it was once part of the work we are trying to trace, it's also possible that it was nothing more than a bunch of fairly well-educated drug manufacturers cooking up meth and LSD on a grand scale. There was nothing left to tell me anything conclusive.

I had a scare while I was traveling. Somewhere in the long passage between here and there, I thought I saw Krycek. I know he's dead, but for just a moment, on a quiet street in a nameless town, I swear I saw him. He watched me for a moment or two, that calculating, questioning gaze, and then he turned and unhurriedly disappeared in the shadows between two buildings.

I was gassing up the car, and was just about done. It took all my will power not to run after him and demand an explanation. Old habits die so very hard. They leave me wanting to chase even ghosts to demand answers to questions I still barely know how to ask.

It left me shaken for days. So many old memories stirred up. I know he's dead. You told me how he died, but I still have trouble believing that Skinner would have acted as you described. Or that you could witness such an act so dispassionately. But I also have no idea what living under Krycek's constant threats would do to someone. How the unendurable pain and uncertainty would wear away the disciplines and control of a lifetime. I sometimes feel that Skinner was another casualty in our war, one of the walking wounded who is nearly dead but has too much obstinacy to actually fall over and die.

We've lost so many along the way. And sometimes parts of ourselves.

During this long separation I have had more time than I want for reflection. It is inevitable that none of us is the same person as when all this began. Human beings grow and change in reaction to their surroundings and circumstances, and our lives have given us more than the usual amount of stimuli to react to.

Do you ever wonder how your life would be different if we hadn't met? I wonder sometimes about where I would be and what I would be doing, and I find that I cannot imagine a present that doesn't include us. That doesn't include this work. I didn't look for this, but it found me anyway. There would seem to be something to this fate business.

So I am what I have become and could be nothing else, I think. It has not always been an easy journey, as you know. But I am stronger than I have ever been, and I am a different, more confident woman than I was 10 years ago, and I wouldn't give that up for anything. I know things about myself that I didn't expect to know - how far I can be pushed, that I could actually shoot to kill or protect, that I can lie to save a life. That I could give away our child...

There are some lessons I have learned at too high a price. But what you pay for something is all relative in the end, isn't it? I am here, you are here, and we know why we are doing this thing. We have lost parts of ourselves along the way, but we have gained so much more.

I seem to be talking in circles tonight, but perhaps it is only just. We do not travel in straight lines, you and I.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_November 12_

Cooler now, but a sunny day, leaves blowing and crunching along the sidewalk. Winter can't be far away now.

There are children in this town. Lots of them running along the sidewalks, riding their bikes, playing in the park.

It hurts, Mulder. I look at their bright, laughing faces and I think about William and Emily and can't help but grieve for what we didn't get to have. There are days I can barely stand the sight of children, when a woman pushing a baby carriage down the street makes me want to weep until I am blind and choking on my own tears. I didn't expect that. I didn't expect for there to be this hole in my heart that won't ever fully close.

It is perhaps my only regret about our partnership - that we will likely never have the ability to simply be a family. That I ultimately felt that William had no chance at life unless he wasn't with us. I know that you don't blame me for the decision I made, and I hope you know that I have never blamed you for finding myself in the situation of having to make that decision. It is simply a grief I bear.

It is these moments when I'm glad you won't actually read these letters. As far as we've come, there are still some things I'm not sure I'm ready for you to know. May not ever be ready for you to know. I don't think I have the strength to try to convince you that my sorrow on this point has nothing to do with you. This grief I carry is simply one more price for living, and I know that.

Someday I think we will talk about this, but I am not ready yet.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_November 20_

The first snowfall of the year. A very light dusting, but an unarguable announcement of Autumn's end.

The seasons are changing again and still we are apart. I thought I would have heard from you by now, but there has been no word. Have you traveled even further than we thought you might have to? Have you found unexpected detours?

In the books, the heroes always win - they triumph over adversity through character-building tests and decisions. Real life is so much more complicated. Good people get ground up in the system, the wrong people die, the wrong people win.

I didn't expect to miss the Gunmen so much. I didn't know them well, but I came to think of them as allies and friends over the years.

I don't think I ever told you about the night Frohike came over when you were missing out in the Arizona desert. It was something like 2 am. He'd had far too much to drink. Swaying in my doorway, apologizing for his presumptuousness in coming over. But he was grieving for you as much as I, so I invited him in and we sat at my kitchen table and talked. He tried to tell me how much you'd meant to him. He called you a "redwood among mere sprouts." It was both sweet and ridiculous in the way that only Frohike could manage. He talked for a long time and I finally persuaded him to pass out on my couch. When I woke in the morning, he was gone and I didn't see him again for some time.

But at a time when so many of our "real" colleagues were treating me like a leper, I cannot forget the genuine act of courage and sweetness that it took for him to venture from his cave to seek me out.

I didn't expect to miss them so much.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_December 15_

A little snow, just enough to provide a light cover over the sullen mounds of ice and snow that remain from last week's storm.

My work here is nearly done. The final calculations and analyses should only take another day or two. I have what we were looking for here. It is not the answer we had hoped for, but it is enough for the next stage. I think.

I'm exhausted. The final stages were exacting and difficult, but I managed to extract the compounds we need and develop the formulas for the follow-on work. I have that triumphant tiredness that I used to feel after a big round of finals at med school. I wanted to share that triumph with you. Instead I feel as though I could sleep for a week.

In the supermarket today, there was a tabloid with a headline about a rain of fish in Montana. I turned to tell you about it, to joke about opening a case file, only to realize for the thousandth time that you weren't there with me.

Missing you is no simple thing. I spent so many years without you, but now I expect to find you there always, like my shadow, or my right hand. You are a part of me, somehow. I wonder how often you turn to tell me something only to realize I'm not there.

There has been no word from you. I should have heard by now. I still believe in my heart that you are out there, but where?

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_January 5_

It is a few days into the new year. It was cold and bright today - sun glinting off the ice and snow. Trees dusted with snowflakes that refracted cold rainbow-hued halos. The sharp brightness of the light made my eyes water as I stared unseeingly over the landscape.

I still haven't heard and now I don't know what to do. I will move on to the next location and begin what I think needs to be the next phase of the work, but for the first time, Mulder, I am deeply uncertain.

The world has frozen around me, and I am so very cold.

After med school, when I was doing my Pathology internship, I spent long hours in morgues working on autopsies, and analyses. They are cold, windowless places and I learned to work in the silence and chill. The dead are usually quiet - some of our cases notwithstanding - and I came to appreciate the solitude, the cold quiet of their company. I was never spooked by the bodies, never felt haunted.

Now, though, the cold and silence that surrounds me here is oppressive. I feel cut off from the living world. My work done here, there is no one to talk to, and I spend too much time staring out the window of my apartment and thinking about all the things I never said to you.

Do you know how much I respect you? As much as we argue, as much as we disagree about some of the fundamental ways we believe the universe is constructed, I never treat your serious theories with anything but careful consideration, regardless of what my attitude may have indicated to you at one point or another. I don't think I have told you this, but I hope you have come to understand it over these long years.

Do you know that I think you're funny? I have to force myself not to laugh at your more outrageous comments sometimes because I don't think your ego needs constant feeding, but I value that sense of humor so very much for the unexpected light it has produced in the midst of the idiocy that sometimes surrounds us.

Do you know that I have no regrets about our work, our partnership? You have, at various times, intimated that I would have been "better off" doing more normal FBI work. I should have been clearer with you that there was never any turning back for me after that first night, when, by candlelight, you allayed my fears about the mosquito bites and then proceeded to tell me about what you were chasing. That was it.

Do you know that I love you? I think you do, but I am so careful with my words around you that I fear I may never have told you so in exactly those words, and I should have.

I love you, Mulder. Come back to me.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

_February 12 ___

__Cloudy, but with the promise of sun later in the day._ _

__This will be, I hope, my last entry. I received your message, and am leaving today to meet you. At least I hope I am. The message seems to have been delayed in transit, and I wasn't sure how long you intended to stay at the rendezvous point. I will be traveling as fast as I know how._ _

__I am uncertain how to conclude this journal. This has been an interlude, a pause between acts in this strange drama we are playing out. I will no longer need to speak to you through the pages of this book. Soon we will be face to face. I will see your face again, and I am living for that moment._ _

__But for now, I feel as though I should be trying to find some way of bringing this all together. Of trying to find some neat way of summarizing what I have felt and discovered while we were apart. I don't know how to do that. I have been aware, while writing this, that I was speaking as much to myself as to you. That I was trying to puzzle my way to answers about some of the mysteries that surround us and the way our hearts intersect. I have always believed that there are answers out there. I just don't know if there are any in these pages._ _

__There is much still ahead of us. If the future is anything like our past, we will have winding roads, and obstacles and setbacks and still we will travel, sometimes in circles. I may miss you at the meeting point, and have set out looking for you in all the improbable places you might be. But even if we don't meet tomorrow, I know that we will travel and travel until we circumnavigate the globe and find each other again._ _

__That, maybe, is the only answer I need._ _

__THE END_ _

**Author's Note:**

> My very deep thanks to the Fab Four Betas - To angstville for enthusiasm and catching the small, but important things. To nlynn for precision, comma patrol, and for a couple great suggestions. To bonetree for seeing the big picture. And to erehwesle, the Alpha Beta, for always seeing and saying exactly the right thing.
> 
> My thanks to lilydale who was a great swap recipient, and to Maureen B. Ocks, whose story I adored.


End file.
